Dipartimento di Economia aziendale

Il tema della sicurezza sul lavoro stenta ancora a imporsi benché costituisca un problema di perdurante attualità. Nel volume s’intende dar voce a chi non riesce a farsi ascoltare perché intento a guadagnarsi (o preoccupato a mantenere) la sicurezza del posto di lavoro prima ancora di esigere una sicurezza sul lavoro. Prendendo le mosse dall'osservazione etnografica di un luogo carico di stereotipi come il cantiere edile, si invita a riflettere sulle principali dinamiche quotidiane di costruzione in pratica della sicurezza e si propone una lettura di diverse situazioni di non rispetto delle norme. In particolare di quei casi in cui l'uso dei dispositivi di protezione individuale risulta difficile e problematico. Le tre possibili chiavi di lettura proposte richiamano la pratica della spavalderia, la dimensione del sapere esperto e le pratiche di collaborazione e coordinamento tra gli operai. La ricerca mostra come la mancata comunicazione e interazione tra il livello istituzionale, dove si decidono le norme, quello organizzativo in cui si recepiscono e quello delle pratiche in cui vengono tradotte (e spesso tradite) nell'attività di lavoro quotidiano, impedisce l’instaurarsi di quel processo di circolarità del sapere che accrescerebbe e migliorerebbe la conoscenza delle pratiche sulla sicurezza nei vari contesti locali.

Prefazione di Davide Nicolini

The POS: artefacts that (dis)organize safety

The paper proposes a reflection on the issue of safety at work through the operational plan of safety (POS), a textual artefact provided by the legislature as a tool aimed to collect the various measures of prevention and safety to be taken in a specific context of work. Through ethnographic observation of some urban construction sites and the shadowing of site managers, the paper explore the complex, controversial and problematic nature of the POS. This document must respect the PSC (Safety Plan and Coordination) and it has to be translated into the POS and be able to travel to the sites. The research shows a particular critical issue: it’s often written through the practice of “copy and paste”.
The observation of several critical issues related to POS provides interesting insights about the complex process of translating safety into practice, where workplace safety itself can no longer be considered only as a situation where “the official documents are ok”.
Keywords: Safety, Everyday Working Practices, Textual Artefact, Operational Plan of Safety, Prevention, Ethnography

Institutional reforms and legislative interventions, having affected the healthcare system for years, seem to confer to the middle management an important role in managing organisational change. From the stories collected through research carried out among learners and ex-learners of the Master in Management and Innovation at Sapienza University of Rome, it has emerged the need for them to develop transversal skills indispensable for performing their role as mediators of top-down organisational innovations. Concerning digitalisation processes, we have collected both stories of resistance to the use of ICT and also the request for a participatory and integrated design of technological innovations. Uncertainties and cultural resistances caused by these changes fragment careers of professional women and men who narrate how they put in play different practices and skills in building their own paths and, for women only, in reconciling them with their care activity.

Technologies are changing the world of work, as the diffusion of new ways of working (e.g. smart working) shows. The paper, based on a qualitative research carried out in a banking institution, reflects on what kind of gender conciliation this new organization of work promises and allows to the professionals interviewed. Is this “proactive approach to flexibility” freeing all workers by allowing them a better work-life balance or is bringing back women to work from home? The widespread use of smart working, due to Covid emergency, makes this issue relevant more than ever. The analysis of the stories warns enthusiasm against standardized models or recipes and invites to look for tailor-made solutions able to exploit the smart working potentiality. Re-cognizing heterogeneity of professional profiles, and their needs, and dealing with the stereotypes of gender that still characterize the work-life balance issue is the next challenge.

The world of working is changing and the technological transformations are playing a relevant role in this change. In particular, new technologies are making the physical boundaries of traditional offices increasingly permeable, allowing the diffusion of New Ways of Working (Demerouti et al. 2014, de Kok et. al., 2014), such as smart working. This paper, based on a qualitative research and discursive interviews, intends to reflect on the introduction and ‘top-down’ management of smart working within a banking institution. At the same time, it aims to grasp the role attributed to and played by technology in its implementation. Starting from the two reconstructed stories, I shall show if and how the innovations introduced whereby technologies enable us to work ‘remotely’, are changing existing power relations (Brocklehurst, 2001; Orlikowski, 1992) and what control dynamics emerge from the field.

The following critical note on ‘doing sociology visually’ aims to present three works edited by three different authors which, starting from different goals and fieldwork, arrive to support the importance of the visual in social research. This should be an incentive to continue in this direction with awareness and by increasing visual research.

... Tra gli operai ei responsabili di cantiere ai quali ho “fatto da ombra” (Sachs, 1993; Sclavi, 2000; Bruni, 2003; Czarniawska, 2007), ma ... Affidarsi alla scaramanzia permette di contenere la negatività del negativo evitandole di espandersi, come de Martino (2004) evidenzia nel suo ...